The Mother Lode gold belt carries the most productive and best-known mining districts in California's gold country. Although the entire foothill region of the Sierra Nevada is sometimes loosely termed the "Mother Lode Country," technically the Mother Lode is a 120-mile-Iong system of linked or en echelon gold-quartz veins and mineralized schist and greenstone that extends from the town of Mariposa, north and

northwest to northern El Dorado County.

The most productive portion of the Mother Lode has been the 1 mile segment between Plymouth and Jackson in Amador County. Other major sources of gold in the Mother Lode have been the Angels Camp, Bagby, Carson Hill, Coulterville, Georgetown, Greenwood, Jacksonville, Jamestown, Kelsey, Mount Bullion, Nashville, and Placerville districts.

The northwest-trending Mother Lode Belt traverses western Tuolumne County and is associated with the Melones Fault Zone. The rocks of this belt are typically metavolcanic, metasedimentary, and ultramafic, some of which have been hydrothermally altered to assemblages as described below. Mother Lode Belt mineralization is characterized by steeply dipping gold-bearing quartz veins and bodies of mineralized country rock adjacent to veins. Mother Lode veins are characteristically enclosed in Mariposa Formation slate with associated greenstone. The Mother Lode belt vein system ranges from a few hundred feet to a mile or more in width. Within the zone are numerous discontinuous or linked veins, which may be parallel, convergent, or en echelon. The veins commonly pinch and swell. Few can be traced more than a few thousand feet. Mother Lode type veins fill voids created within faults and fracture zones and consist of quartz, gold and associated sulfides, ankerite, calcite, chlorite, limonite, talc, chromium-bearing mica, and sericite. Stringer veins are commonly found in both adjacent footwall and hanging walls. Mother Lode ores are generally low- to moderate-grade (1/3 ounce of gold or less per ton), but ore bodies can be large. Ore shoots are generally short, 200-300 feet being the average stope length. However, they persist at depth, some having been mined to several thousand feet (Clark and Lydon, 1962). Ore shoots are commonly localized at bulges in veins, shear zones, vein intersections, or near abrupt changes in strike or dip.

Mineral List

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